Diary: David Brooks’s ‘On Paradise Drive’

Looking in on price clubs where the shopping carts are so big, they practically need airbags

Is David Brooks miscast as a political columnist? Since 2003 he’s been the embedded conservative on the op-ed page of the New York Times. But his books often give the impression that he’d rather be Dave Barry than William Safire. He says this about price clubs in On Paradise Drive (Simon & Schuster, 2004), the sequel to his Bobos in Paradise:

“ … what’s truly amazing is that wherever you go in a price club, everybody in every aisle is having the same conversation, which is about how much they are saving by buying in bulk. Sometimes you overhear ‘If you use a lot, it really does pay’ or ‘They never go bad, so you can keep them forever’ or ‘It’s nice to have 15,000 Popsicles, since someday we plan on having kids anyway …” All the people in the aisles feel such profound satisfaction over their good deals that they pile the stuff into their shopping carts – which are practically the size of 18-wheelers, with safety airbags for the drivers – so that by the time they head toward the checkout, they look like the supply lines for the Allied invasion of Normandy.”